Category: Technology

There’s a lot of things I don’t like about the “millennial” generation, or whatever the hell it is we’re calling those kids these days, but I tend to track them on technology use. This is an interesting article speaking of the decline of voicemail, especially among younger people. (via Insty). As someone who’s never liked phones, I could not be more pleased. I do almost all of my communication via iChat and texting these days, except when I need to talk to old people who don’t text.

There are other generational differences in technology use too, which I’ve noticed, both in workplaces and in my personal life. One is printing. I actually own two printers, but I very rarely, if ever, print anything. Most of the baby boomers I’ve worked with, if they want to read a paper, will send it to the printer. I do almost all of my reading electronically.

Baby boomers fairly readily adopted e-mail as a communication medium, which I think that’s probably the next technology likely to be rejected by the young, if it hasn’t been already. I’ve gotten rather indifferent toward e-mail as a medium. I still use the work e-mail systems, but I’m absolutely horrible about reading and responding to e-mails. Part of the problem with e-mail is that spammers have largely ruined the medium. Spam filtering is getting better, but it’ll never be perfect, and there’s nothing more annoying than having someone ask you about an urgent e-mail, only to find it in your spam folder.

Of course, that’s not to say there’s not a difference between me (a Gen Xer) and the Millennials. I’m typing this on a desktop computer with two 23 inch monitors. Desktops, I think, are becoming something lame old people use. The kids these days seem to love their thin laptops with 13 inch displays. I don’t know how they can get any work done in 13 inches. I have a laptop too, but it has a 15 inch display, an ethernet port, and a DVD drive, and much of the time when I use it, it’s at a desk hooked up to a big 24″ monitor.

What other generational shifts do you all see in technology use?

You know computer pattern recognition has to be getting pretty good, because the latest trend seems to be CAPTCHA that is so convoluted that I can’t read it either. It’s annoying enough that, while I hardly comment on blogs at all anymore, I really am loathe to comment on blogspot blogs, because I usually have to try the CAPTCHA two or three times before I actually get it right. I think the usefulness of CAPTCHA is probably getting close to nearing its end, and we’re going to find some better tests to tell computers from humans.

The second technological pet peeve is with web designers, who always seem to be looking for new an innovative ways to ruin the experience. I find myself saying or thinking “No, I don’t want to download your f**king app, just let me through to your site!” way too often these days. Anyone who does a lot of browsing on mobile devices today likely know exactly what I’m talking about. One of the chief philosophies of the Web was supposed to be platform neutrality, but I suppose since mobile browsing has largely been successful murdering Flash (a self-defense killing if you ask me) there had to be some new way for bad web designers to crap all over things.

Looks like more and more Americans are cutting the cord. Four hundred thousand since the start of the year. We did it two and a half years ago and have not missed it. Les Jones is a cord cutter too, and is still getting basic channels because he’s a cable internet customer. I have a FiOS for Business circuit which powers the blog and my home office, but no TV service. When I cut the cord, I didn’t think it was worth 100 bucks a month. Now I don’t think it’s worth 50.

The Higher Education bubble is a persistent theme over at Instapundit, and I thought an observation he made about the constant yammering about the need for scientists among politicians is pretty spot on:

I was talking with someone the other day who advanced the proposition that there are probably only 50 really first-rate scientific minds produced in the United States every year. And then came the question: Does the current system of training and funding scientists encourage those 50 to stay in the game, or to find something else to do?

Original post here. At my previous small pharma company that went under a year ago, I was one of the highest paid employees that wasn’t in executive management. The typical person in my field has a bachelors degree, or usually at most a master’s degree. I hold a B.S. in Computer Engineering. Many of the people making less than me held a Ph.D. in Chemistry or Biology. If we were truly short on this skill, the market would pay these people more. As it is, the pharmaceutical industry has a glut of scientists. Many of the people I’ve worked with have not found new permanent employment, and those that have took pay cuts.

The problem is, as Professor Reynolds mentions, that many scientists just have the wrong skills. Just because you have a Ph.D. doesn’t make you any more immune to marketplace changes than anyone else. The fact is that bench chemistry is something easily outsourced to places like China and India, where labs can be run for a fraction of the cost they can be run here. Also, not all bench chemistry requires an advanced degree. The people I know who are still employed, and who improved their lot in terms of career, were experienced medicinal chemists who were very good at analyzing data, and understanding what the data was telling them about where to go in their design process for a potential drug.

The fact is, the market right now is absolutely saying we need fewer, but better scientists. Anything politicians are telling you about a shortage, at least in the fields of Chemistry and Biology, is a load of bunk.

Les Jones is becoming a cord cutter. We did it about two and a half years ago, and haven’t looked back. I don’t miss flushing more than 100 dollars a month away on 557 channels and nothing’s on. I don’t even use rabbit ears. Our TV is idle most of the time. I think TV reached its zenith (no pun intended) with the baby boomer generation, and it’s going to be downhill from here for any industry that makes its livelihood of selling people traditional television programming.

Our regular topic of conservation is looking a little slow today, so I’ve been catching up on my tech blogs. Looks like Google will be making a version of Chrome for iOS, though I’m skeptical Apple is going to open up its walled garden to allow Google to cut them out as a middleman on ad search revenue. With the introduction of Lion, Apple turned Safari into an unmitigated pile of garbage. On Mac OS, there is Chrome, though it does not do reading list or tab synchronization with Safari on iOS devices. If Chrome does indeed come to iOS, I could kiss Safari goodbye for good entirely. I recently tried the 5.1.7 update to Safari, and believe it is a step backwards, after some minor improvement since the launch of Lion. It’s now as unstable, once again, as it was when Apple pooped Lion unto the world. Many of the other initial issues with Lion have been fixed, but Safari is still an unstable piece of crap. All they’ve essentially done is separate the user interface from the actual rendering engine, so if the rendering engine takes a dump, all you notice is that all your tabs refresh. This is great until this happens when you’re in the middle of a post, and suddenly you’re back to the last autosave, and it’s demanding you log in again. In addition, like iOS, Safari starts purging out pages when it runs low on memory, regardless of how much RAM you have free on the box. This is understandable on iOS devices, which are limited in RAM, but on a machine with 8GB RAM, it shouldn’t manage memory this way.

I heard someone characterize Lion as Apple’s Vista. Based on my experience that’s an entirely accurate description. Mountain Lion better be a real improvement or I’m going to seriously consider going back to Linux, despite the fact that I found the Gnome 3 Desktop to be about as unstable as Safari.

Instapundit links to an interesting article discussing how many potential planets there are in our galaxy, suggesting that as many as “40% of red dwarf stars may have Earth-sized planets orbiting them that have the right conditions for life.” This strikes me as awful premature, given that I don’t think our species are experts on what constitutes “the right conditions for life.” Most of what we believe about how exactly life came about, why, and under what conditions, is speculation, backed by some experiments that show you can synthesize complex organic molecules in laboratory conditions that mimic the early earth.

In fact, if I had to wager, I’d say that Earth-sized planets that orbit in the habitable zone of stars are remarkably common, but that life is comparatively rare, and intelligent life is extremely rare. Professor Reynolds concludes with one of his trademark “We need interstellar travel. Faster, please!” and I tend to agree we need to figure it out fast, but I’ve always been skeptical of the possibility of this, despite the fact that it’s necessary for man’s long term survival.

For one, there’s an intergalactic speed limit, which is the speed of light. Sure, you can speculate about being able to warp space and time, but even if it’s theoretically possible, we have no idea how to even go about it. That leaves us with traveling at sub-light speeds absent discovery of some new physics we don’t understand currently. The nearest star to ours is about 4 light years. There are about 50 stars within about 16 light years of us. Most of them different types of stars from the sun. The fastest you could reasonably move a craft with foreseeable technology would be about 5 to 10% of the speed of light, making a trip to the nearest star take 40-80 years. You don’t get serious time dilation until you get up to 70% or 80% light speed, and at those speeds, we have no idea how we’d make a ship survive even a micro meteorite collision, let alone how to make the crew survive the radiation they’d be plowing through on their way across the galaxy. The amount of energy involved is also unimaginable. We’re talking exajoules to get to the nearest star, even at a pretty modest speed of 5 to 6% c.

So I’m afraid unless we have a lot of breakthroughs in the next 50 years, we’re hundreds of years away from visiting a nearby star system. I think the only way we’ll even accomplish it is either to figure out how to move our consciousnesses to machines, or alter our genetic makeup to live longer, and be adapted for the high radiation environment of space. If we do make the trip, it’s likely going to be one way, which means we’ll need to improve our ability to observe and analyze exoplanets from here in our solar system, so that if we aim for a target, we know we’ll hit something that supports human life.

And that’s not even mentioning what the life there would do to us once we get there. It’s a tough, tough problem, and I’m just not sure humans are smart enough to pull it off at this point in our evolution.

Some folks might remember me mentioning a NASA rocket launch from Wallops Island, Virginia about a week ago. Early this morning they did it. I stayed up for it. For a clear view with no tall trees, I walked up to the nearby elementary school soccer field 3 times, only to have them hold for shipping in the exclusion zone. Third time, at 4:55, was a charm. The rockets only burn for a few seconds after launch, so I didn’t really see them until they started releasing the chemical tracer. I watched the tracers for a few minutes, noticed four, but could not see the fifth, and then headed home.

I took pictures and video, but the trails were dimmer than I expected, so they didn’t turn out. I did not notice any conspiracy theorists running from their homes screaming “They’re poisoning us! they’re poisoning us! This is how they keep us all compliant!” once the chemtrails started to disperse. My guess is they were fast asleep, dreaming of things the CIA is secretly transmitting into their brains.

UPDATE: Some official NASA photos:

 

UPDATE: Video here.

The stuff Boston Dynamics is coming up with is both very cool, and very scary:

I for one, welcome our new robot overlords. I feel like we’re only a breakthrough in battery technology away from a breakthrough into another phase of technology advancements on multiple fronts, similar to industrialization and the information revolution. Right now I think the limitation is going to be storing enough energy for these machines so they can be useful in the field.